Top 75 Karl Rove Quotes
#1. I hate to sound sort of diffident about it but it strikes me that a lot of people on the right have got active lives and are doing other things.
Karl Rove
#2. You all had something to do with keeping me employed.
Karl Rove
#3. The Tea Party movement is a wide and diverse group. It will hurt the Republican Party if some elements of the Tea Party decide to become third party advocates because it will split the conservative vote.
Karl Rove
#4. I know enough about European politics to know you've got a lot of crazy people who make their way onto the ballot.
Karl Rove
#5. I mean, if you have to wake up in the morning to be validated by the editorial page of the New York Times, you got a pretty sorry existence.
Karl Rove
#6. We need to be asking for the vote in the most powerful way possible, which is to have people asking for the vote who are comfortable and look like and sound like the people that we're asking for the vote from.
Karl Rove
#7. Many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview.
Karl Rove
#8. Cindy Sheehan is a clown. There is no real antiwar movement. No serious politician, with anything to do with anything, would show his face at an antiwar rally.
Karl Rove
#9. I would have strong opinions and be prepared to argue my case, but if you talk to my colleagues, I think you'd find they consider me the jokester, the informal mayor of the West Wing.
Karl Rove
#10. Somebody gets to be smart and somebody gets to be dumb. If we win, it'll be because of the president. And if we lose, it'll be because of me.
Karl Rove
#11. I left the White House in 2007. You know, I knew when I went there that it would be for a limited period of time. I was grateful that the average tenure of a white house senior aide is 18 to 20 months. I was there for nearly seven years.
Karl Rove
#12. The labor movement must be destroyed.
Karl Rove
#13. When you appoint someone, you appoint somebody because of their character, their convictions, their abilities. And not because you have a belief, a confidence, in a foreordained outcome in any given decision.
Karl Rove
#14. We've been probably to some degree too successful.
Karl Rove
#15. Life is rough for a lot of people. Some people live in greater material circumstances than others, but life is rough for everybody.
Karl Rove
#16. Look, in 1800 the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranged to hire a notorious slanderer named James Callender, who worked as a writer at a Republican newspaper in Richmond, Va. Read some of what he wrote about John Adams. This was a personal slander.
Karl Rove
#17. And I think there's something about conservatives frankly - and the Left, when it comes to their channels of persuasion, are unpersuasive. They are, most of them are hate-filled, obscenity-clogged rants of anger and hatred.
Karl Rove
#18. It's not comfortable for me to write about my family. I'm not comfortable writing about me.
Karl Rove
#19. All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus where words don't mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all. Reality is what you say it is, ...
Karl Rove
#20. Guy got in a gyrocopter in Gettysburg, flew under the radar all the way to Washington and came - What if he had had rather than petitions to Congress had had a bomb?
Karl Rove
#21. And not only that, I also have the MacBook Air which is really cool. Even my wife is jealous of my MacBook Air.
Karl Rove
#22. I supported Pat Toomey when he ran in 2010. I gave him money in September of 2009 because I wanted him to be the U.S. senator. I personally contributed my own money.
Karl Rove
#23. Karl Rove told me about Valerie Plame's identity on July 11, 2003. I called him because Ambassador Wilson was in the news that week. I didn't know Ambassador Wilson even had a wife until I talked to Karl Rove, and he said that she worked at the Agency and worked on WMD.
Karl Rove
#24. What Mr. Obama wants in a nominee isn't really 'empathy' and 'understanding.' He wants a liberal, activist Supreme Court justice.
Karl Rove
#25. I'm not a journalist. I'm a pundit. I'm a commentator, I'm somebody with an opinion.
Karl Rove
#26. [T]he economy remains the top issue for the electorate.
Karl Rove
#27. The difficulty for Mr. Obama will be when the public sees where his decisions lead - higher inflation, higher interest rates, higher taxes, sluggish growth, and a jobless recovery.
Karl Rove
#28. You need to look at Congress as having a certain capacity. Now, the capacity varies from year to year and from body to body, but there is a finite amount of things that Congress can attentively do.
Karl Rove
#29. I think if you talk to my colleagues, I was less than a fearsome individual.
Karl Rove
#30. I believe in traditional marriage.
Karl Rove
#31. If you really want to diminish a candidate, depict him as the foil of his handler. This is as old in American politics as politics itself.
Karl Rove
#32. If there's a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is.
Karl Rove
#33. If you make a mistake, clean it up quicker rather than later.
Karl Rove
#34. The world is a better place with Saddam Hussein gone.
Karl Rove
#35. Memo to White House: Calling voters stupid is not a winning strategy.
Karl Rove
#36. Well, I don't want to become a prognosticator.
Karl Rove
#37. You may end up with a different math, but you're entitled to your math. I'm entitled to the math.
Karl Rove
#38. Mr. Obama denounced the $2.3 trillion added to the national debt on Mr. Bush's watch as 'deficits as far as the eye can see.' But Mr. Obama's budget adds $9.3 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. What happened to Obama the deficit hawk?
Karl Rove
#39. I think it's dawning on some Democrats that obstructing the Patriot Act, like they've been obstructing everything else, is bad for them politically.
Karl Rove
#40. If you look underneath the surface of the Tea Party movement, on the other hand, you will find that it is not sophisticated. It's not like these people have read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek.
Karl Rove
#41. Crossroads is second to none in our support of Tea Party candidates. In 2010 and '12, we spent over $30 million for Senate candidates who were Tea Party candidates. We spent almost $20 million for House candidates who were Tea Party candidates.
Karl Rove
#42. The fallback position in politics is if you don't know what you want to be about, and if you don't know what your vision is, go at somebody else.
Karl Rove
#43. My name is Patrick Fitzgerald ... I like to tear the tops off small animals.
Karl Rove
#44. Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.
Karl Rove
#45. I'll never get out of politics. I have friends in public office. I have things that I want to do. You can't go back in life. I won't go back to the existence I had before of running a political consulting firm and signing up clients and advising campaigns in exactly that way.
Karl Rove
#46. I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble.
Karl Rove
#47. I've been booed on stages. I'm a little bit tougher than to walk off a stage because someone says something ugly.
Karl Rove
#48. Negative politics have always been around.
Karl Rove
#49. Well, I'm a Christian. I was a born a Presbyterian and became an Episcopalian.
Karl Rove
#50. Mr. Obama has an ingenious approach to job losses: He describes them as job gains.
Karl Rove
#51. If we do with Latinos what we did with African-Americans, Republicans and conservatives will be doomed.
Karl Rove
#52. To win in November, Republican candidates must show they are in touch with voter concerns about growth, jobs, paychecks, government spending and debt. The only way to do this is by offering specific, persuasive ideas.
Karl Rove
#53. I have become an adjective. There is something called a Rovian-style of campaigning and it's meant as an insult. One columnist said it consists mainly of throwing mud until it sticks. One prominent blogger described the elements of a textbook Rovian race as fear-based, smear-based and anything goes.
Karl Rove
#54. At the core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views of the world.
Karl Rove
#55. As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.
Karl Rove
#56. My parents, particularly my father, had been used by commentators, political journalists and political commentators, to attack me, and the collateral damage was the reputations of my father and my mother.
Karl Rove
#57. In Europe and the United States, you've got different systems to select candidates, and no system is perfect.
Karl Rove
#58. Now is the time to be bold. It is easy when the wind is at your back. But the real test is now when the wind is in our face. That's when we find out if we are tough enough. Inspired enough, committed enough.
Karl Rove
#59. We face a brutal enemy who will kill the innocent for one purpose and that is to gain control of the Middle East and to use the leverage of oil to bring down the West, and to attack us again.
Karl Rove
#60. Well, marriage is a very important part of our culture and our society. If we want to have a hopeful and decent society, we ought to aim for the ideal.
Karl Rove
#61. (Jason Leopold is) "a nut with Internet access (Page 439).
Karl Rove
#62. Once again the powers of light and good have triumphed over the media!
Karl Rove
#63. For a person who promised hope and civility in politics, Mr. Obama has shown a borderline obsessiveness in blaming Mr. Bush.
Karl Rove
#64. Mr. Obama plans to boost federal spending 25 percent while nearly tripling the national debt over 10 years. Americans know that this kind of spending will have economic consequences, including new taxes being imposed by the new progressives.
Karl Rove
#65. Would the Iraq War have occurred without WMD? I doubt it,
Karl Rove
#66. Our competition for American business is no longer in the next county or the next state, it's around the world.
Karl Rove
#67. But, look, Washington is a town that creates myths for its own existence and its own amusement, and I was a subject of myth, sort of like Grendel in Beowulf - you know, not seen very often but often talked about.
Karl Rove
#68. Ronald Reagan wasn't in the establishment of the Republican Party either, nor was Richard Nixon.
Karl Rove
#69. Look, there ought to be politics in politics.
Karl Rove
#70. Hurricane Sandy interrupted Mr. Romney's momentum and allowed Mr. Obama to look presidential and bipartisan.
Karl Rove
#71. The claim made by Team Obama that every dollar in stimulus translates into a dollar-and-a-half in growth is economic fiction. The costs of stimulus reduce future growth. No country has ever spent itself to prosperity. The price of stimulus has to be paid sometime.
Karl Rove
#72. I wish I had the billions of dollars that George Soros has that he has used to fund Democratic causes in the past.
Karl Rove
#73. In his first 100 days, Mr. Obama has put the fate of his presidency in the hands of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He may come to regret that decision.
Karl Rove
#74. I think it was Osama bin Laden's [idea to start a pre-emptive war in Iraq].
Karl Rove
#75. Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year? Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.
Karl Rove
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